UPDATE 2012-11-30: The problem described in this post no longer applies since yesterday 2012-11-29, as the ia32-libs* multiarch transitionals have finally landed in Testing. Installing libgl1-nvidia-glx:i386 after previously installing the rest of the NVIDIA stack from Experimental appears to work flawlessly.

Quite notably, everything is working fine with the latest Debian wheezy packages (although I compiled my own newer kernel later anyway) except for the onboard sound controller.

Ah! But not so fast! I had forgotten that Debian wheezy’s half-baked multiarch support has serious implications for 32-bit OpenGL-based software on the amd64 platform (a.k.a. x86_64 for everyone else), regardless of whether one is using a proprietary (e.g. NVIDIA) or free (Mesa) stack. In Reicore’s (Mesa) case, this meant that I had to stick to the version from ia32-libs in Testing, which is Mesa 7.7.1 — contrast with the native version, which is 8.0.4.

In Nanacore’s case, the implications span even more packages. The description of the libgl1-nvidia-glx-ia32 package in Testing (amd64 arch) says:

This is an empty transitional package to aid switching to multiarch.
Run the following commands to install the multiarch library:

dpkg --add-architecture i386 ; apt-get update

apt-get install libgl1-nvidia-glx:i386

And, surprise, surprise. That doesn’t work in Testing because of bug #686033 — fortunately for me, apt-get was wiser in blocking the operation due to some perceived conflicts.

In an attempt to solve this, I pulled the NVIDIA driver packages from Unstable and then tried to install libgl1-nvidia-glx:i386 again to no avail — it requires me to upgrade ia32-libs from the version in Testing to the one in Unstable, which is really a multiarch transition metapackage. After watching multiarch in Debian wheezy become such a major disappointment over time, I decided to do something different with libgl1-nvidia-glx:i386.

I decided to install it by hand.

The procedure was a little convoluted and involved a lot of symbolic links, and I’m not completely sure whether what I did works because I don’t have Wine installed right now and I don’t really want to install Debian’s packages because—again—they use multiarch support to pull nearly 92 MiB worth of redundant crap:

Not to mention that by pulling Mesa it might as well break my little patchwork setup with NVIDIA’s 32-bit libGL here. This is not something I’m too keen on trying out while stuck on shitty 3.5G mobile broadband.

I intend to revisit and unravel this conundrum at a later point and try to understand and document my libGL installation solution but, again, I have bigger fish to fry.

The Intel HDA codec for these controllers is apparently not quite ready yet; as a result, the mixer sliders are slightly broken in that there is no master channel, the speaker channel has no actual volume slider, changing the PCM channel’s volume causes some slight noise, and I suspect some features are missing as well. Despite this, the driver works for basic usage given some precautions with the KDE sound system to choose the correct (PCM) channel for audio instead of the sliderless (speaker) channel. I would not mind to spend some additional time researching the situation later, but I really need to get back to work on non-audio stuff (a.k.a. AtS) right now, so that will have to wait.

Incidentally, the Debian KDE desktop task includes PulseAudio now (I believe this wasn’t the case with Squeeze). Rather unsurprisingly, PA continues to be a considerable annoyance for my usage (e.g. lockup during KDE login, 1% extra CPU usage during playback from any application), so I ditched it after a day or two for plain ALSA. I don’t really have a need for the extra layer of indirection since PA uses ALSA anyway and my sound needs are very basic — basically, just playing sound from media players, games, and application notifications.

For graphics I’m using a decidedly inexpensive NVIDIA graphics card for the sake of having an NVIDIA graphics card and parting ways with Mesa for a good while. And while I had intended from the get-go to install the proprietary drivers, a forced and thankfully short Nouveau intermission confirmed that Nouveau indeed eats kittens. And that’s really all there is to say on the matter.

Both the machine and Debian wheezy can do UEFI, but I quickly stumbled upon a couple of issues:

Using the EFI version of GRUB means the only way to get a working text console on Linux is to use a framebuffer console driver such as efifb. This is not supported by NVIDIA and the driver complains quite loudly about it.

The machine appears to enumerate my (USB) 3G modem’s built-in storage as the first and second hard disks when it is connected, breaking GRUB’s expectations about the location of the disk from which it will boot, which becomes the third (SATA) hard disk in such a situation. The PC BIOS version of GRUB only gets to see the real hard disk drive.

Since this is my first time dealing with an UEFI-based system yet, I don’t really know whether the second point is a bug in GRUB, or the platform itself. Regardless, the first point pretty much convinced me to not spend any further time on that and just go back to the BIOS flavor of GRUB. This doesn’t seem to have done anything for my broken Windows 7 installation, which I probably don’t really need.

I have been working on transferring my configuration and files from Reicore since this Monday, approximately, and I think I’m nearly ready to get back to business now.

(I actually wanted to post this on the 7th but I got sidetracked by the system migration and testing.)